Grazed from MBTMag. Author: Patrick Carey.

A few weeks ago I was trying to update some files I have stored on a cloud storage service (that will remain nameless). I had moved my files there a while back as a way to make it easier to access them from my various devices and to avoid losing them during the next inevitable hard drive failure. For the most part I’ve been happy with the service, but on this day, I was unable to access the site. Not good, as I was rushing to make some changes and send the files to a colleague.

Frustrated by my situation, I asked a co-worker to see if he was also having problems. He was, so we did the next logical thing you would expect. We went to the service provider’s status page to see what they had to say. According to it, the service was healthy and there were no current service or maintenance notices…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Cliff Saran.

Steve Ballmer has unveiled plans to reinvent Microsoft with a big push to develop hardware from phones to set top boxes, as it attempts to remain relevant in the era of IT consumerisation. In a memo to staff, the bullish CEO stated: “The bedrock of our new strategy is innovation in deep, rich, high-value experiences and activities. "It’s the starting point for differentiated devices integrated with services. Our family will include phones, tablets, PCs, 2-in-1s, TV-attached devices and other devices to be imagined and developed.”

Addressing the success of Apple in creating a homogenous hardware and cloud environment with desirable devices, Ballmer said: “No technology company has as yet delivered a definitive family of devices useful all day for work and for play, connected with every bit of a person’s information available through one cloud.”…

Grazed from RackSpace. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud service provider and hosting company Rackspace (RAX) has tapped former VMware (VMW) CMO Rick Jackson as the company’s new CMO, looking to leverage his industry knowledge and Rackspace’s leadership position around hybrid cloud computing.

Jackson, who joined the company at the beginning of July, will direct Rackspace’s global marketing strategy and execution toward the company’s hybrid cloud goals and initiatives. Before Rackspace, Jackson was responsible for leading VMware’s global marketing strategy, a CMO role he held since early 2009. He also held chief marketing roles at Borland Software and BEA Systems…

Grazed from Caspio. Author: PR Announcement.

Caspio, Inc. (http://www.caspio.com), the leading platform-as-a-service for custom business applications, today announced that it has introduced an entirely new pricing plan that breaks the traditional PaaS pricing model by removing all caps on applications, users, storage, and email messages. Caspio’s new Standard plan now includes all available platform features and resources to create unlimited web applications, making it the most cost-effective way for companies to utilize do-it-yourself PaaS technology for custom business apps.

A cloud pioneer since 2000, Caspio has led the PaaS industry offering "unlimited user" pricing since its founding. Unlike other platforms, Caspio allows any number of employees, customers, members, partners or web visitors to access applications at no additional cost. The latest pricing change is a reflection of the company’s continued commitment to usage-based pricing that reduces adoption barriers and maximizes the economies of scale available from cloud technology…

Grazed from Fujitsu. Author: PR Announcement.

Fujitsu today delivers the choice and integration support services that organisations need to keep pace with change, innovate their businesses and navigate cloud complexity. Leveraging its ICT heritage and international presence, Fujitsu declares a global strategy and strengthens every aspect of its end-to-end portfolio of services and solutions for cloud. The company also introduces the concept of Cloud Integration, new offerings and harmonised naming conventions.

Most business leaders agree that the cloud can help them address many challenges. It is also seen as a catalyst for business transformation, particularly in the era of social, mobile and big data explosion. However, according to independent international research commissioned by Fujitsu, 59% of decision-makers believe decisions about cloud adoption are more complex and difficult in their companies, based on their unique mix of corporate culture, organisational structures, geographic presence, infrastructure, processes and other factors…

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author: John Boitnott.

Cloud computing is one of the most valuable innovations for business, providing cheap, virtual services that once required expensive, local hardware.  We place almost everything in the cloud, but what do we really know about its security?  How do we protect ourselves and our privacy from being compromised?

Fears over cloud security were not assuaged last year when Dropbox, a popular online cloud storage platform, was hacked yet again.  This attack resulted in unauthorized access to employee accounts containing personal information of users, and spam being sent to users’ personal folders. There have been other slightly more embarrassing security controversies for the term dropbox, but we won’t go there…

Grazed from Datamation.  Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Perhaps more so than any other company, Amazon has helped to define the new Cloud era of computing.  While Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) cloud offerings are tightly associated with specific tech capabilities and increasingly competitive pricing structures, there is another key element in Amazon’s cloud portfolio — support.

Brent Jaye, is VP of AWS Support, a position he came too after first spending years toiling in Amazon’s traditional retail sales division. Jaye told Datamation that AWS services a very wide range of customers, including some of the largest enterprises in the world, as well as many small businesses and individual customers. To that end, Amazon offers a number of different support options to meet the specific needs of the various use cases that customers have in place…

Developers are under pressure to develop quality applications faster and across more channels than before. To address this need, Oracle has delivered new releases of its Java Development Tools and Framework. Oracle Application Development Framework, Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse enable developers to rapidly and efficiently build multi-channel — Web, cloud and on-premise — applications, while providing a richer end-user experience.

Long-time competitors Microsoft Corp and Oracle recently announced they would collaborate with Oracle software on its cloud-based platforms, permitting bits of Oracle’s software to interface with Microsoft’s software and online services.

This effort is aimed at improving the rivals’ chances as new competitors emerge selling less expensive services based in remote data centers.

BMC Software responds in a blog by Lilac Schoenbeck in Cloud Computing.

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Is the cloud computing marketplace becoming the domain of a few big vendors? With large players including Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM coming online with similar types of services, we may be starting to see a consolidation of the primary cloud computing market into the hands of a few powerful vendors.

This may herald the emergence of an IT oligopoly, Owen Rogers, senior analyst at 451 Research, suggests in a recent research note. Actually, he goes further to say what is emerging is both an oligopoly and monopoly at the same time. With identical services comes commoditization, and only big vendors that can deliver huge economies of scale with margins will survive in this space…